Live data from Hacker News

Richest Bitcoin Addresses

bitcoinrichlist.com

161–170 of 208 posts

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#161
post #156
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might working with an oversimplified model of the market. If you have 1% of all bitcoins, you're not going to be able to sell them all at the highest standing offer-to-buy (OTB). If the highest standing offer to buy is at $700, it's not going to be an offer to buy all 120,000 of your BTC. It might be an offer to buy 100BTC. So you sell 30BTC at $700 and then move on to the next lowest OTB, which might be 20BTC@$6…

heh so then how come when Bitcoiners are quoting the price of the ecosystem they always take the number of BTC * the highest standing OTB... i know thats kindof a tangent but.... seriously, i'm curious

That is how every commodity market in the world works....

How do you think an exchange rate between say USD->EUROS is decided? By the last trade price....

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#162
post #158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea but that involves work in a sense. You have to tend to this land and develop communities or the land is worthless. I'm sure the value grew over time as the residents were able to make it into a nicer place. They didn't just buy a few bytes of data & see the value appreciate by 9billion% just for sitting on their fat asses. And that's the other issue. Land is an ACTUALLY limited resource. We don't know how to pull…

What about everyone who bought a .com domain early.... Or really anyone who buys a stock early for a company that becomes huge. I mean, if you buy bitcoins right now you are speculating that it will become a stable currency at some point. It offers a bunch of interesting and disruptive features that cut out a lot of middle men.

eh I hear what you're saying but i just don't believe this one.

.com addresses appreciated in value because they are an actual good -- an address on the web that only 1 person can own. Bitcoin is a currency that isn't serving its purpose yet and whose function can be easily mimicked. All it is is an open source codebase & some infrastructure. If another coin (Litecoin, for example) were to take off, they would just add support for that too no big deal.

Point being, it isn't the sole implementation of this concept. .com addresses are by nature unique.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, they made a very risky bet and it paid off. Would you have considered compensating them if the value went to 0?

Was leaving your computer (or your work computer) on over night a few years ago really such a huge risk?

The risk is that if the startup/technology (Bitcoin) failed, you just wasted your time/effort in setting up something useless. There must be thousands of these proposals that you will face in your life.

Bitcoin is the risk I knowingly didn't take, because I didn't think it would amount to anything in the future.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way to recover the Bitcoins?

You could run vanitygen to guess the private key to any Bitcoin address. It might take a few billion years.

It could also take just one day if you are lucky. It impossible to predict, just like the future of bitcoin.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin address is a hash of public key. So, without address reuse you should break both EC, RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256

I'm confused, how can you break EC but not be able steal people's money? Similarly, if you found had preimage attack for ripemd160(sha256(x)) (you can find a public key with the same hash as any other hash), how could you not steal people's money?

To break EC you need to get EC public key. You can't get it unless bitcoin address was reused.

If you found pre-image for ripemd160(sha256(x)), you still need to find a private key for it.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#166

Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and one can have many addresses.

For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably owned by the same person.

http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#167
post #160
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

greed-monger! Currency is something relatively stable, it's not a trading platform. I spoke about it in this way the other day -- One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after t…

"One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after that) well.... you don't have a currency, you have a speculative commodity." This is just not true for many currencies that have u…

>This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation.

This is true. But generally speaking, people go quite a bit out of their way to use currencies that are perceived to have a predictable future value.

This is why the dollar (and the Euro) is so popular the world over; it's value is pretty predictable, compared to most other commodities.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#169
post #160
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

greed-monger! Currency is something relatively stable, it's not a trading platform. I spoke about it in this way the other day -- One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after t…

"One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after that) well.... you don't have a currency, you have a speculative commodity." This is just not true for many currencies that have u…

> This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation.

When that happens, people tend to abandon them as currencies (though a currency undergoing hyperdeflation would be hoarded as a store of value).

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin address is a hash of public key. So, without address reuse you should break both EC, RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256

I'm confused, how can you break EC but not be able steal people's money? Similarly, if you found had preimage attack for ripemd160(sha256(x)) (you can find a public key with the same hash as any other hash), how could you not steal people's money?

The public key behind an address is only revealed if you do a transaction to spend the bitcoins in that address. So the public key is effectively secret until just before it is scrapped with normal use.
Post reply on HN